Algolia Appoints Former Twilio Exec, Bharat Guruprakash, As Chief Product Officer

Algolia, the leading API Platform for Dynamic Experiences, today announced that Bharat Guruprakash has joined as the company’s first Chief Product Officer (CPO). Bharat will lead Algolia’s product organization to provide customers with an expansive platform of APIs to create composable applications that empower them to deliver rich, personalized, and dynamic digital experiences in real time to end consumers.

“Powering tomorrow’s dynamic experiences means building market-leading products that enable businesses to predict user intent, deliver results, and build trust one moment at a time. We’ve hired our first-ever CPO to help us execute on this vision,” said Bernadette Nixon, CEO, Algolia. “Our goal is to expand our product portfolio beyond search.”

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Before signing on with Algolia, Bharat spent five years at cloud communications platform leader Twilio. Most recently, he served as general manager of Twilio account security, the upstack authentication and verification business for Twilio. In this role, he owned the authentication and verification steps that an end consumer goes through every time they engage with a brand. Before that, Bharat was senior director of product management and engineering, leading the product strategy for Twilio becoming fully omni-channel and migrating upstack in a developer-friendly way.

Prior to Twilio, Bharat served as vice president of product at Bitcasa, where he led the product management, visual design & UX, and technical support teams. While at Bitcasa, he led the company’s pivot from a purely consumer business to a developer-led B2B2C platform. Bharat also held product and engineering management roles at Samsung and Digi International.

“Algolia, with its strong search foundation and API Platform for Dynamic Experiences, has a unique opportunity to enter new verticals and address new use cases to provide personalized and customized digital experiences,” Bharat Guruprakash said. “Search and information retrieval are critical building blocks and I look forward to expanding Algolia’s product portfolio to address our customers’ needs.”

“There is a ‘war for personalization’ going on as end consumers demand more from the brands they interact with. This has gotten especially challenging in our increasingly privacy-centered world. The more we are able to effectively and safely unlock and apply first-party data to digital experiences, the better it will be for end consumers,” Bharat Guruprakash continued. “Ultimately, we want to enable our customers to provide relevant real-time digital experiences to end consumers on every interaction.”

Bharat joins Algolia during a time of tremendous corporate growth and product innovation. Algolia serves more than 10,000 customers globally, powering 1.5+ trillion annual searches, and is used by about one in eight people online. Today, Algolia’s search volume is estimated to be four times bigger than Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and Yandex combined.

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